Courts Threaten Polygamists` Way Of Life

HILDALE, UTAH — This isolated town and its Siamese twin, Colorado City, Ariz., share a U.S. post office. They also share an exotic history as hideouts for excommunicated Mormon polygamists on the run.

Hounded by the church that threw them out and raided repeatedly by state authorities who frown on their lifestyle, the patriarchal sect known as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has maintained a scrupulously low profile for decades. Colorado City and Hildale were logical sites for a group intent on keeping to itself: Straddling the state line, they are among the most remote communities in the country.

But now the sect finds its well-concealed financial and familial affairs unraveling for public view.

Last week, a federal judge in Salt Lake City began examining bank accounts to determine whether church patriarchs illegally appropriated donations and profits from church-owned businesses and placed them in their personal holdings.

At the same time, a state court in St. George, Utah, is deliberating whether to allow one of Hildale`s leading polygamous families to add to its already large brood by adopting six children.

The mainstream Mormon church, which claims more than 8 million members worldwide, abandoned polygamy in 1890. Mormon sources estimate that between 20,000 and 50,000 excommunicated Mormons still practice polygamy, with Colorado City/Hildale the largest single commune. Other polygamist groups include the United Apostolic Brethren in Murray, Utah; a commune in West Valley, Utah; and assorted sects in Montana, California, Canada and Mexico.

Colorado City and Hildale, with a combined population of 4,000, were founded in the 1920s by fugitive polygamists Leroy Johnson and Sam Y. Barlow. To the south is the unbridgeable chasm of Arizona`s Grand Canyon, and to the north are the 2,000-foot sandstone cliffs surrounding Utah`s Zion National Park.

Local legend holds that community founders built their houses on skids so that if law officers approached from the Utah side they could hitch their property in Hildale to a team of horses and drag it across the border into Arizona. If Arizona authorities approached, they could drag the houses in Colorado City into Utah.

Local leaders such as Kevin Barlow, Colorado City`s town clerk, dismiss such tales as ``pure hype and bunk.`` But residents of the commune have taken advantage of geography and fled across state lines during police raids.

A raid in 1953 from the Arizona side captured only 26 of the sect`s male members.

Houses in Colorado City/Hildale tend to be huge, more like barns than bungalows, with upper floors dotted by the windows of numerous bedrooms for wives and offspring.

The towns` wide streets-the main drags are broad enough to turn a yoke of oxen pulling a Conestoga wagon, as prescribed by Mormon prophet Brigham Young- seem filled with blond, blue-eyed children. Boys wear long-sleeved shirts buttoned at the neck and wrists to conceal the ``Mormon garments`` similar to union suits that they must wear at all times. Girls are in ankle-length gingham dresses, petticoats and waist-length pigtails.

Makeup is shunned, as are movies, television, radio and other trappings of the outside world.

Town Clerk Barlow acknowledged that of the roughly 4,000 people counted in the 1990 federal census, nearly two-thirds are children, reflecting the group`s primary injunction for its members to ``be fruitful and multiply.``

While refusing to discuss his own marital status because polygamy remains a felony in Utah, Barlow said, ``We`re just hoping to be left alone to practice our religion as we see fit.``

The polygamists have received significant legal help from the American Civil Liberties Union in the battle to maintain their controversial lifestyle and communes.

The ACLU filed a brief in the Utah Supreme Court last year urging that a family`s polygamous living arrangement shouldn`t disqualify it from the right to adopt children. The justices agreed and ordered a lower state court to rehear the petition.

As a result, the sect`s plural-marriage and family practices now are being documented in a bitter adoption fight that pits the polygamous Fischer family of Hildale against a non-polygamous relative of the children the Fischers want to adopt.

Vaughn Fischer took as his third wife a widow named Brenda Thorton, the mother of six children. Thorton died of breast cancer in 1987; Fischer and his remaining two wives, Sharane Fischer and Katrina Stubbs, initiated adoption proceedings.

Janet Johanson, Thorton`s half-sister and a former ``sister wife`` who fled a polygamous marriage, filed suit in opposition.

Documents filed in the case have revealed some of the secrets of the sect`s way of life, such as the teaching that ``sister wives`` must be subservient to a ``primary wife`` and that all wives must strive to treat all the family`s children equally, regardless of who the mother is.